CAL POLY NEWS

Clearing the Air

By Becky Zieber

Photo by Jean Paul Molyneux

Tracy Thatcher (left) and Carmen Trudell (right) with a prototype of the Breathe Brick.

This year a Cal Poly architecture professor and four undergraduate students received a patent for the Breathe Brick, an innovative wall system that improves air quality by passively removing particles from the air through internal cyclones.

The design was the product of an interdisciplinary partnership between architecture Professor Carmen Trudell, engineering Professor Tracy Thatcher, and a team of students representing architecture, environmental engineering and mechanical engineering.

Trudell got the idea as a graduate student working on a design project in Cairo, Egypt. While trying to find ways to lower air toxicity, she found inspiration in an industrial hygiene textbook. “We flipped to the page about cyclones, and there was this diagram that made perfect sense for what we wanted to do.”

After receiving a grant in 2012 from the College of Architecture and Environmental Design’s Planning, Design and Construction Institute, Trudell went on the hunt for a design team. “Carmen had the idea for the project, and since my specialty is air quality, we got chatting about it,” said Thatcher. “I was able to connect her with potential environmental engineering students to be on the team.”

The variety of disciplines involved in the project was critical to its success. “We were able to think about things from a different angle and come up with ideas that perhaps neither of us would have thought of alone,” Thatcher said.
Student assistants and researchers helped create testable prototypes for the project. “This interdisciplinary team of Cal Poly students carried the work to functioning prototypes with experimental data that corroborated our predictive models and showed that Breathe Bricks are a viable technology,” Trudell said.

They hope to use the bricks in areas with high particulate loading caused by both natural processes like dust storms and manmade processes such as industrial and vehicular emissions. The goal is to improve air quality and reduce energy consumption, all while creating a beautiful architectural building façade.

CAL POLY NEWS

Shooting for the Stars

By Brian Maxey

When Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, it was the fastest vehicle engineered by humans. Thirty-nine years later, the spacecraft has traveled more than 12 billion miles from Earth. But another method of travel will have to be invented in order to reach distant star and planetary systems because it would take some 70,000 years for Voyager to reach the next star system at its current velocity. “Not too many people will be around that long. And not too many of us want to wait that long,” said Cal Poly statistics Professor Gary Hughes. Hughes has another, bolder idea to…

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Jodi Christiansen – Finding Beauty in Black Holes

Interview by Rachel Henry

Physics Professor Jodi Christiansen studies gamma rays from the most extreme environments in the universe — the areas around black holes. These environments can teach us what the early universe might have been like. Cal Poly Magazine sat down with Christiansen to find out what inspires her to pursue knowledge about our very distant past. Cal Poly Magazine: What can the history of the cosmos tell us about today’s universe? Christiansen: We know that the molecules on Earth, the atoms themselves, had to come out of a supernova in the past. So the fact is, we are made of stardust. Can…

Cal Poly News

Alumni Pledge $1.2 Million Toward Wine and Viticulture Center

By AnnMarie Cornejo

Alumni Troy and Basia Gillespie (both Business Administration, ’85) have been in the agriculture industry for generations. “We know the value of viticulture and want to invest in its future because it is so important that students go down that path,” said Troy Gillespie. “Cal Poly’s hands-on style of teaching is invaluable to the future of the industry.” That’s why they recently decided to put their support behind the next phase of development of Cal Poly’s wine and viticulture program, with a $1.2 million pledge to the new Center for Wine and Viticulture. The gift will help fund a new…